Those Who Wait
by Cesario21
Summary: Moody goes to visit Tonks at St Mungo's, after the battle at the Department of Mysteries.


To Those Who Wait  
  
by Branwyn  
  
Judging by the looks he receives from passing medical staff in the corridors, Moody figures he will be lucky to make it through his visit to St. Mungo's without having to hex his way out of restraints from the corner of a closed ward.  
  
The healer's heads are filled with rubbish, of course. Poppy Pomfrey has patched his own head up good as new, without even doing him the courtesy of leaving him a new scar for his collection. He is tired, of course, but they all are, these days, and it'll be a sunny day in Azkaban before a puling brat like Dolohov will put a dent in his armor.   
  
Waking up at Hogwarts early yesterday morning, Moody found himself in a bed next to Frank Longbottom's son, who had filled him in on the parts of the battle he had missed. An hour or so later, on his way out of the castle, he'd caught a glimpse of Harry Potter leaving Dumbledore's office. A look at that boy should be enough proof for anyone that aging and exhaustion have little enough to do with a person's years. Moody has seen Aurors four times Potter's age leave a battle without that exhausted, defeated slump to their shoulders.  
  
He feels for the boy, but he neither pities him nor regrets the blows he took that night. Like it or not, fair or not, the fate of the wizarding world is in his hands, and Moody has been fighting for too long to trust a soldier without a few scars.  
  
He arrives at the fourth floor, locating the closed suite of the Spell Damage ward at the end of the corridor.  
  
"Sir!" A harassed looking mediwitch jogs down the hall after him, tugging at the hem of his sleeve. "Sir, you cannot go into the closed ward, Miss Nymphadora is severely injured and she needs to rest-"  
  
"Nymphadora's more likely to be wasting away from boredom," he growls at her, staring straight ahead with his natural eye while glaring at the mediwitch with his magical one. "No need to get your petticoats in a twist. We're just going to chat for a bit. Not going to make her run an obstacle course, even if she does need the practice."  
  
He puts a little extra weight on his wooden leg, until the mediwitch, unnerved, leaves him to clomp authoritatively toward the door, which opens easily under alohamora.   
  
Moody's eyebrows twitch. Either she's hurt twice as bad as she's allowed the rest of them to think, or they've confiscated her wand. He runs a discreet eye over all the healers and assistants in the vicinity. None of them bear signs of any recent major hex damage. The first faint sting of worry prickles in his chest, even as he's pushing open the door of the strangely quiet room.  
  
The first thing he notices, pausing just inside the doorway, is the pallor of her face, and the distinct bruising around both eyes. The second thing he notices is the strange color of her hair, which is completely red in some places and completely green in others, but is for the most partly a sickly gray, as though she'd tried to change from one color to the other but lost energy half-way through the attempt.  
  
He closes the door behind them, and clomps more softly to the chair at the far side of her bed, which he drops into heavily, and waits.  
  
He is just beginning to wonder if she really is asleep when she speaks, her eyes still closed. "The next time I see that pasty little cow, I'm gonna transfigure her legs into pieces of cooked spaghetti."  
  
Moody grins, and the worry vanishes. "Voldemort might save you the trouble. He's not too happy with her, as I understand it."  
  
Tonks opens one eye, interested. "Yeah?"  
  
"Well, he was counting on those Death Eaters to bring him the prophecy, and she was in charge." Tonks shudders, and he cocks an eye at her. "What, you feeling sorry for her?"  
  
"Well, yeah. I was just thinking about the time you sent me and Trueheart out to Borgin and Burke's after that mummy shroud, only when we came back you told us it was a hag's cowl-"  
  
Moody laughs loudly, and through the long window in the opposite wall several Healers look up and stare. "I jinxed the two of you so's you spent the next half an hour tap-dancing up and down the corridor."  
  
"Yeah, well you can laugh all you like, but people still come up to me in the hall and ask me for a dance, as if there's a single person in the Department of Mysteries you haven't hexed at least once over the last forty years. Anyway, I take it back, I don't feel a shred of sympathy for Bellatrix Lestrange. Voldemort can't be any scarier than you."  
  
Now Moody roars, and an assistant Healer pokes his head in the door, saying, "Now, really," until Moody points his wand threateningly and the Healer backs off in a hurry.  
  
"You should visit all the time," Tonks tells him, finally opening both eyes and beginning to struggle into a sitting position. "I could use someone who can manage the hospital staff without getting themselves clapped in restraints, like, say, me."  
  
"It's cause you're young," he says, pointing a finger. "And you're still too pretty. No one respects a pretty face. Three years on the job, you'd think you'd have the self-respect to pick up a scar or two."  
  
"You'd think," she says, visibly amused. "Hang on a minute."  
  
She scrunches up her face, as though she has just realized she has forgotten something and is angry with herself for it. A moment later her left eye is blue, her nose is long and misshapen, a large chunk missing on one side, and deep lines furrow her brow and the sides of her mouth.   
  
"There," she says cheerfully, looking up at Moody. "Is that better? Let's try it on Healer Wiggins."  
  
He laughs so loudly this time that the same young assistant Healer from before throws the door open, evidently steeling his courage to tell Moody off. Just as he is opening his mouth to do so, however, he catches sight of Tonks' face, and his remonstrance turns into a strangled scream. He turns and dashes away without closing the door behind him, which Moody, chuckling, does with his wand.  
  
"Now tell me something, girly-bird," he says after he can hold a straight face again. "If you can do that to your face, what's wrong with your hair?"  
  
"My hair?" Tonks frowns, automatically reaching up to touch the short grey-green bristles. "What do you mean, what's wrong with my hair? I'm experimenting."  
  
"Oh, right. Er." Conscious of having put his foot in it, in some obscurely male way, he casts about for a change of subject. "How are you coming along, anyway? Everybody else is all patched up, even the kids. For the most part," he adds, thinking of Harry.  
  
"Oh, the Healers reckon I'll be on my feet at the end of the week. They can't figure what it was she hit me with, but it caused all my internal organs to heat up like they was being cooked. Nasty stuff, but I'm 'responding to treatment,' apparently. They don't figure I took any permanent damage, and it doesn't hurt anymore-which is a shame, really, cause I'm right bored."  
  
Moody snorts. "Can't have been hurting properly, then."  
  
"That's what the Healers say." She reaches up to scratch her nose then pulls her hand away, appalled. Comprehension dawns with a soft "oh!" and she scrunches her eyebrows down to her nose. A second later her face assumes its normal shape, complete with intact nose.  
  
"Forgot about that for a second. So, yeah, I'm all right." Her face becomes grave, a shift as palpable as the rearrangement of her features. "I'm a sight better than the next person Auntie Bellatrix dueled, anyway."  
  
"Heard about that, did you?"  
  
"Kingsley sent me an owl to read when I woke up. Mum's real broken up about it. Sirius was her favorite cousin. Mine too, come to it-course, with a family like mine, decent cousins are in short supply." She shakes her head once, violently. "I really hate that stupid bint. You know, when I was a kid, she used to hang me up by the feet for hours in rooms where no one but the ghosts ever went, thought it was dead funny. I should have killed her. I had the chance, and I almost did. Sirius never should've had to fight her."   
  
Moody anticipates the tears almost before they begin to brighten her eyes. If he has learned anything about people in his forty years as an Auror, it is the slow, racking guilt that inevitably comes in the aftermath of a battle.   
  
He's never let an Auror under his guidance go into hospital for longer than a day before making this visit, and as long as he keeps fighting, he never will.  
  
"Look here," he cuts in, before the threatening emotion can come to its crisis. "You did what you were meant to do, you hear me? You did right by your training, and I'm proud of you. Sirius Black was a veteran of more battles than you've seen yet, he wouldn't have thanked you for trying to protect him. You covered him as long as you were able, and you fought fairly and bravely. That's all there is to it, and that's the last I want to hear about it from you, understand me? Now blow your nose," he adds, handing her a dusty, wrinkled handkerchief.  
  
"Right," she says, after depositing the now hopelessly soiled handkerchief into a waste bin. "If you say so."  
  
"I do." He settles back into his chair, appraisingly. It might be a mistake to take the conversation any farther down these lines-but, watching her regain composure without regaining levity, he thinks not.  
  
"The closest I ever come to feeling old is losing folks like Sirius Black. Not just losing him, you see, but losing him twice. You get to be my age, and sometimes it seems like you're fighting the same battle, over and over again." He fiddles with his cane, suddenly self-conscious. "All I can remember of being a young man is fighting the Grindlewald wars. And this one-well, no one really thought the war was over when Voldemort disappeared, no one with half a brain, anyway. But having it all out in the open again...sometimes you have to remind yourself what it is you're fighting for."  
  
Tonks, who has been watching him with serious, bright purple eyes, looks at him expectantly. "Well?"  
  
"Well what?" he says, confusion drawing him from his reverie.  
  
"What is it you're fighting for, then? Honestly, you don't think you can just say something like that and not follow up, it's too maddening."  
  
"Oh. Right." He clears his throat, a bit uncomfortably. "Well, it's a lot of things, obviously, and it's different for different people. But for me, I reckon it's always been for you. Folks like you, anyhow."  
  
Her eyebrows, both green, launch themselves dramatically toward the middle of her forehead. "How's that now?"  
  
He thinks for a moment, chucking the first few sentences that enter his head as unacceptably maudlin. "We fought to keep our world the kind of place where kids could grow up to be decent people, and people wouldn't have to hide their decency just to survive. And we got that, young folks like you being the surest proof of it. You hardly remember the first Voldemort war, let alone fighting in it. But when the call went out this time around, you stepped up to the mark. I reckon that's a sign of our failure, too, since what we really wanted was to keep the wolves away from your doorstep. But the fight's never really over, even when the Grindlewalds and the Voldemorts are ashes. You understand that, and that's the real victory. So, there's your answer, if it's any kind of answer at all."  
  
He takes a deep breath, and fiddles with his cane some more. His magical eye spots the fuming Healer Wiggins standing outside the door of Tonks' room, as though building up his courage for the next assault.  
  
"That was kinda beautiful, Mad-Eye." It is Tonks' turn to look at him appraisingly. "You know, I reckon I ought to marry you after all."  
  
"What?" His magical eye comes swirling back to join the other, staring at her with an outrage that is only partially feigned.  
  
"What do you say, Alastor? You, me, naughty games under the Invisibility cloak? Reckon my mum would give us a couple of Foe Glasses to start housekeeping with."  
  
"You've been staring at the walls of a hospital room for too long," he growls at her, leaning heavily against his cane as he gets to his feet.  
  
"What's your hesitation? Oh, I get it. I'm young. No one respects a pretty face. Here we go." She wiggles her nose a third time, and her hair turns silver. Lines gather around her eyes and nose, and her mouth becomes thin and pruny. "Well?" she says, grinning, her voice rough. "Can't be my age, can it?"  
  
Moody's laughter rattles the glass in its window pane, and he has to grab the back of his chair to keep his balance. The door flies open, also for the third time, and the Healer, at this point tried beyond the limit of his endurance, glares at Moody until he catches sight of Tonks, who winks at him.   
  
"Merlin's beard," he mutters, and turns away, sighing deeply.  
  
"You rest up," Moody says, walking to the end of Tonks' bed and patting her foot. "You're coming up for drills in Stealth and Tracking when you get back. I'm directing them," he adds, warning in his voice. "So no whinging. I'll expect you to be on top of your game."  
  
"You have no feeling for a poor convalescent," she says accusingly.  
  
"Convalescent my left buttock," he growls, and brushes past the Healer, who immediately begins to emanate quiet relief. Tonks' laughter follows him until he is at the end of the ward and turning for the stairs.  
  
"All right down there, young master?" calls the portrait of Paracelsus Proctor from over his head.  
  
"He's in the best of heath, the heartiest and halest of his years," a Healer from the seventeenth century cries in reply.  
  
"Almost as well preserved as we are," a plump nineteenth century witch adds loudly, and they all burst into loud fits of laughter.  
  
"Alive, though, aren't I?" he mutters to himself as passes the Welcome Witch, who looks at him once again as though she would like to put him somewhere dark and quiet. "Alive, and still turning the heads of pretty young things." He snorts in quiet amusement. "Even if their heads are full of rubbish."  
  
Being deceivers, yet we are true, unknown, yet well known, dying, yet, behold we live, punished, yet not killed, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, poor, yet making many rich, having nothing, yet possessing everything. -- 2 Corinthians 6:8-10 


End file.
